“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” – Henry James

The storm rushed the shore all night and this morning as the tide rose, I walked down to Davis Bay with Karen and her lovely dog Shanti. The highway workers had a pump on the flooded corner, frantically trying to keep up with all that the not-so-Pacific was flinging at them. Logs were flung up on the seawall, the barricades tossed over like Lego and one of the heavy-duty metal picnic tables was crushed…Clearly Mother Nature was in the throes of some serious perimenopausal shifts. How else to explain all that furious energy?

But it got me thinking how She is very good about clearing the decks and starting over. The slate is swept clean and, as the bumper sticker says, Today is (once again) the first day of the rest of your life.”

Let us begin it then.

I am rereading Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. This little book was first published in 1934 and the writing has that distinctly back-in-the-day diction.

Lest that lull you into thinking it’s quaint and lovely, be warned. Miz Brande brooks no nonsense. This is not all lovely affirmations and lovely heartwarming advice. She was someone, I’m sure, who would not have suffered fools. At all.

She doesn’t put up with lame excuses or lacklustre attempts.

You are to buckle down and get at it. If her book were to be summed up, I believe it would say, “If you want to write, write.”

Her most unusual writing advice is to take a sabbatical from words because, “If we are left alone long enough and forbidden to read, we will very soon be talking to ourselves…starve yourselve for a few hours in a wordless void. Stay alone, and resist the temptation to take up any book, paper, or scrap of printed matter…flee the temptation to telephone someone.”

She gives a compelling argument.”Prisoners who never wrote a word in the days of their freedom will write on any paper they can lay hands on…a two-year old will tell himself stories, and a farmer will talk to a cow.”

Her prescription for good writing? Disappear and be alone for as long as you can each day. Resist the urge to talk about what you’re writing, because, “Sooner or later, he himself would begin to talk about the work he had in mind, and, to his astonishment, he discovered that the urgent desire to write the story disappeared as soon as he had got it thoroughly talked out.”

This appeals deeply to my introverted side, who is so often at the mercy of my more extroverted and dominating self. (I believe I have mentioned the whole Gemini thing before…)

The storm is subsiding a little now. The house is still standing. The tide has pulled back & the rocks on the shore are scrubbed clean.

I am sitting here with a cup of tea and with Becoming a Writer at my side. Decks are clear. I’m ready to go.